Easter - part III

It's the middle of the night, the sun is shining just outside my window here in Longyearbyen on Svalbard, and apparently theres a solar eclipse going on at this very moment, but only 9 percent or so is being eclipsed so I can't really be bothered to stick my head out the window to have a look.

So, easter, part III. Well, hum, so, we stopped by Paulabreen (Paula glacier) on our way to the east coast, or rather, we stopped on the sea ice in front of the glacier.

Paulabreen is a surge-type glacier, that is a glacier that every now and then decides to move forward really fast, and then quiet down again. Wikipedia can tell you more.
Anyway, Paulabreen surged 600-700 years ago, ending up with its glacier front 25 km further out than today. But, Skobreen (Sko glacier), which terminates into the side of Paulabreen, surged in, ehm, 2005, or around there, pushing on Paulabreen, making the front of Paulabreen move forward up to 10 metres a day for over a year. This whole business makes the glacier become massively crevassed and nasty and beautiful, none of which you can see from the pictures below. But it is nice and eerily blue.

Amanda demonstrating how to perform glacier/sea ice yoga in a scooter suit and -helmet, and still looking good!

Ice, ice, baby. Mind you, I haven't tweeked the colours in these upcoming icepics (haha! did you get it?) at all. The ice was actually this amazingly blue.

Oh! And all around on the sea ice you could see little black spots appearing and disappearing and reappearing. These were ringed seals, coming up for breath and trying not to be eaten by polar bears. Well, I didn't bring much of a zoom lens, so the pics below are already heavily cropped, but at least you can see it's a seal-like animal.